what we
know for some curious reason as "the softer passions." Caesar's Gaelic
wars, his bridges, his trouble with the impedimenta, his fights with the
Helvetians--who cares for them? Who cares greatly for Napoleon's
expedition against the Allies? Of what human interest is Grant's tale of
the Wilderness fighting? But to know of Calpurnia, of her predecessors,
and her heirs and assigns in Caesar's heart; to know the truth about
Josephine and the crash in Napoleon's life that came with her
heartbreak--if a crash did come, or if not, to know frankly what did
come; to know how Grant got on with Julia Dent through poverty and
riches, through sickness and in health, for better or for worse--with
all the strain and stress and struggle that life puts upon the yoke that
binds the commonplace man to the commonplace woman rising to eminence by
some unimportant quirk of his genius reacting on the times--these indeed
would be memoirs worth reading.

And whatever worth this story holds must come from its value as a
love-story,--the narrative of how love rose or fell, grew or withered,
bloomed and fruited, or rotted at the core in the lives of those men and
women who move through the scenes painted upon this canvas. After all,
who cares that Thomas Van Dorn waxed fat in the land, that he received
academic degrees from great universities which his masters supported,
that he told men to go and they went, to come and they came? These
things are of no consequence. Men are doing such things every minute of
every day in all the year.

But here sits Thomas Van Dorn, one summer afternoon, with a young broker
from New York--one of those young brokers with not too nice a
conscience, who laughs too easily at the wrong times. He and Thomas Van
Dorn are upon the east veranda of the new Country Club building in
Harvey--the pride of the town--and Thomas is squinting across the golf
course at a landscape rolling away for miles like a sea, a landscape
rich in homely wealth. The young New Yorker comes with letters to Judge
Van Dorn from his employers in Broad Street, and as the two sip their
long cool glasses, and betimes smoke their long black cigars, the former
judge falls into one of those self-revealing philosophical moods that
may be called the hypnoidal semi-conscious state of common sense. Said
Van Dorn:

"Well, boy--what do you think of the greatest thing in the world?" And
not waiting for an answer the older man continued as he held his ci